This is my first blog entry! Very cool! I've always wanted to keep a day to day diary but never have bothered before.
I've posted this in my bio, but just to get the ball rolling, let me introduce myself.
I work as a corporate travel agent and just got married to a great guy last October. We own our own home, a 60 year old house in need of some work, most of which we're doing ourselves. We have about $19,000 in credit card debt and my husbands truck to pay off. After that we want to save up at least 3 months of expenses for an emergency fund. We hope to have kids in the next two years or so, and we want to have our finances in order (or close to it).
I'm just turned 30 a few weeks ago, my husband is 34, and our dog Missy is 8. Tim, my husband, works nights and I work days. Oddly this works for us and we see each other more than you'd think.
Being newly married, we've just gotten to the point where all our finances are combined, and I'm handling all the money stuff. I've had a budget of my own for years, before I met Tim even, but now I feel that I truely have the resourses to start doing things with our money. My budget isn't very detailed, but I have all the monthly stuff down on paper and know exactly where our money is going.
My goal isn't to be the cheapest person on the planet, or even very frugal, though I'll try to save money where I can. I just want to manage the money we have better, so we can get our debts (epecially the credit cards) paid of ASAP.
I'm in the process of trying to get the credit limit on one of my CC's raised so I can do a 0% balance tranfer and get all the other CC's consolidated onto one account and at 0% interest. This alone should help tons. If I can't get the credit limit increase, then I'll just pay the minimum on all the cards except the one with the highest interest and put all the extra money towards that one until it's paid off, then snowball the rest. Either way I hope to have it all paid off in about 18 months. Without adding in Tim's overtime, I can pay about $1000 a month towards our CC debt, and I hope to increase this amount when possible.
The hard part is that we are also trying to fix up our home at the same time, so much of our extra money (ie Tim's overtime) is going towards home improvement projects. Right now we are putting in a fence for the dog (and for our own enjoyment, who are we kidding!) that Tim is making by hand (it's a 6 foot wooden privacy fence) It looks great but is taking a long time to complete and is rather expensive. At least it will add to our home's value so I guess it's not a total loss. Can't wait until I can let the dog out and not have to be out with her! Also, our A/C went kaput and the repair guy says we need a new A/C and a new furnace. We knew they were 30 years old when we bought the house so it was no big surprise but I'd hoped they'd last a year or two before having to be replaced. It's $6,000 so it's going to have to wait until next year, fortunatly the furnace still works and should get us through next winter, it's just really old and not efficiant and the repair guys says it WILL break sooner rather than later. I guess the silver lining is that with the A/C unusable, we won't run up any high electric bills this summer. I hope it doesn't get too hot...
Well, this is enough for a first post. I'll post again tomorrow.
1st post!
June 13th, 2006 at 09:23 pm
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June 14th, 2006 at 04:38 am 1150259937
DH works nights, so on really hot nights, DD3 and I have a cool room slumber party until DH gets home..(2-3am).by then, DD#s room is cool enough to sleep.
June 14th, 2006 at 01:30 pm 1150291824
DH has an old window unit from his single days that's in his storage unit (trying to get him to move his junk out of it so we don't have to pay for it anymore, but that's a topic for another day...) that we plan on using if the weather gets too hot. We also have two box window fans that help a lot too, once the sun goes down we use them to suck in the cooler air from outside and it really makes a differance!